Digital video is being used in an increasing array of applications ranging from personal computers (PC) and videoconferences to digital televisions (TVs), set-top boxes, and personal video recorders (PVR). These varied video processing systems have a myriad of content delivery types, ranging from cable, satellite, and terrestrial broadcasts, to streaming video and video-on-demand over the Internet. Despite attempts to standardize, these delivery infrastructures (e.g., DirecTV, ATSC, DVB, US Cable, and ARIB) vary in their formats, conditional access standards, and demultiplexing requirements. Furthermore, these video products are getting more-and-more interactive and sophisticated, and are evolving in the features and services they support.
Demands of high performance and flexible systems with capabilities to address such varying standards and formats and evolving features have created many design challenges. Therefore, there is a need in the technology to develop a flexible and scalable Transport Processor architecture that addresses these varied applications, different content delivery systems, varied formats and standards, and evolving features and requirements.